etrailer | Detailed Breakdown of the Thinline LED Clearance and Side Marker Light

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Hey everybody, Ryan here at etrailer. Today, we're gonna be checking out and showing you how to install the Optronics Thinline LED Clearance and Side Marker Lights. Whenever you're redoing trailer lights, you know, if it we're me, and you're gonna go through the trouble there's no question, I would definitely upgrade to an LED like this one here, over the traditional style incandescent bulbs. LEDs, I mean, it's just, you know, they're much better nowadays than incandescent type bulbs, and I think that's kind of the standard now. You look at all the new cars on the road and everything, they're all set up like this and that's because these LEDs, they are super bright. I mean, even in a lit up bay I can hardly look at this thing for more than a second or two, it really throws off some light.

There's three LEDs in there. These things run a lot cooler, they don't take nearly as much amperage as an incandescent bulb, so that's always a bonus too. And they just last a lot longer. They're not gonna have that brittle filament in there like your incandescent bulb does that'll burn out. So these are just, they'll take abuse a lot better.

You're hitting bumps and stuff on the trailer, they're just not gonna fall apart like an incandescent light would. So probably wondering if this is gonna work with your setup, and just to go over a few measurements. So as far as how wide the light is it's gonna be 2.5 inches wide, an inch and 3/16 tall, and the thickness or the height of it, I guess you could say, is gonna be about 7/8 of an inch. So pretty standard size. These are really common lights, you know, you see 'em on a lot of different applications.

The back of it, this is the type of connector plugs it has, so one will be power, one will be ground. And there's all different types of plugs you can use that we carry. So you have one like this that'll plug in, and obviously you got your power and ground. You've got some single ones like this, if you're using a self grounding type housing like we are here today. This prong will plug into the housing and provide the ground that way.

So I usually just end up going with direct replacement whatever was on the trailer before that, you knew it worked. But it's not a bad idea to upgrade or, I'm sorry, replace all them other components too while you're at it, just so everything's new, you know, while you're in there. The light though is submersible, so like on a boat trailer you don't have really nothing to sweat there. I do suggest though before pulling it, backing it up into the water, to just turn the power off just to be on the safe side. So while these are the red, they're completely red, there's also amber colored ones. I know there's lights out there that have clear lenses with red lights, clear lenses with amber colored lights, and just about any combination you would want want really. So, you know, you should be able to find what you're looking for. And if you like the clear lens better, you know, if you've got a white trailer or something, that's always an option for you. But really at the end of the day, that's about it. It's a good replacement or even upgrade from that incandescent type bulb. As far as getting it installed, I mean, not really much to it, it plugs in. But we went ahead and just redid everything here, our light, our housing, and our wiring. So I feel like most people that's what they wanna see, so that's what we did. And if that's something you wanna check out feel free to hang around, we'll go ahead and do that together now. So to begin our installation, first things first, we need to remove all the old stuff. So with our light, take a flat head screwdriver and you just pry that out. And obviously we'll disconnect it there, and push that wire out of the way. And then we will remove our old housing. So this one is riveted in, and with these, you just drill out the center. So take a drill bit, just big enough. Drill them out, and we can get this old stuff removed here. Now we can get our new housing installed. So with these, I like to use rivets to secure 'em. I would imagine you could use a nut and a bolt if you wanted to, or a screw, but I'm using the rivets. And since if your frame of your trailer is metal, when you screw this in, this will ground it to the frame and you'll be good. Since ours is fiberglass here we have to do something a little bit different. We actually have a ground wire with the ring terminal on it that is connected to the metal part of our frame, and you could

[mattschindler]

How do you know what input is positive on the back of the light?